Night Owls is a themed open thread appearing at Daily Kos seven days a week.
Adam Clark Estes at Vox writes—How the Biden administration can save the Postal Service. The Postal Service has to do more than deliver mail if it wants to survive:
[...] “Envisioning the post office for the future, you can’t just fix the artificial bookkeeping things and then expect the post office to magically be fine in its previous business model,” explained Porter McConnell of the Save the Postal Office Coalition. “I think it needs to be given the ability to innovate, in order to really start being a powerhouse.”
Put differently, even if Congress pulls through with a bailout and ends the prefunding mandate mess, the Postal Service still needs to evolve to survive. The Save the Postal Office Coalition, which includes 300 groups, including the APWU, MoveOn, and Color for Change, came together not long after DeJoy joined the agency and is calling for $89 billion in emergency relief for the agency in President Biden’s first 100 days. It’s also pushing for Biden to appoint a “postal czar” who favors postal banking and reform-minded leaders to fill the four open seats on the USPS Board of Governors, which Trump had left empty in the final months of his presidency. If Biden fills all the seats, Democrat-appointed governors would make up a majority of the board, giving them the power to remove DeJoy from office and reshape the Postal Service’s role in American life.
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
TOP COMMENTS • RESCUED DIARIES
TWEET OF THE DAY
QUOTATION
“Mostly these four years will be recounted as far-right brutality against truth, fact, rights and bodies, and that brutality and its consequences mattered. But that’s not all that happened since 2016. Grassroots movements for racial and gender justice, economic justice, climate justice and intersectional understanding of the relationships between these things grew in power, achievement and perspective.” ~~Rebecca Solnit (2021)
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2017—Researchers: Obamacare repeal could kill more than 43,000 people annually:
David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandleris, both professors of public health at the City University of New York at Hunter College, Lecturers in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and founders of Physicians for a National Health Program, have a sobering message for the nation: repealing Obamacare will be lethal for tens of thousands of Americans every year. [...]
Popular vote loser Donald Trump has already promised to slash Medicaid spending with block grants—there goes some 10 or more million people with coverage—about 21,000 deaths. No Republican has advocated for maintaining one of the key aspects of coverage under Obamacare—free preventive care, like cancer screenings. Everyone who has health insurance now can get those screenings, along with vaccinations and screenings for things like diabetes and high cholesterol. When they're not available without copay any more, fewer people will use them. Fewer people will find out if they have potentially life-threatening illnesses because of that. Fewer people will get early treatment for cancers that might not have spread if caught earlier.
Just from those two things that we know Republicans say they'll do—or not do—in a replacement plan, we know that there's going to be less care and more expense for millions. That means returning to the bad old days before Obamacare, when tens of thousands of people were dying premature and preventable deaths.